Film & Discussion Event-Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides

Do you enjoy participating in film discussion? Are you interested in the history of Japanese immigrants? Then we have an event for you! JETAAMN is happy to introduce a film showing and discussion event for the film “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides”. This thought-provoking film is a documentary based on the personal stories of first-born daughters of Japanese women and the trials and hardships they endured living in 1950’s America.

The film screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Mirja P. Hanson with Mr. Lawrence Farrar, career diplomat who was posted in Japan five times and Professor Hiromi Mizuno, Associate Professor in History at the University of Minnesota. There will also be a reception after the screening.

This event is co-presented with Japan America Society of Minnesota & JET Alumni Association of Minnesota and supported by Sasakawa USA and USJETAA.

Three women — all firstborn daughters of Japanese war brides — recall their mothers’ lives in 1950s America. These were the brides young GIs brought home from an enemy nation. By at least one estimate, nearly 50,000 Japanese women crossed the Pacific as wives of American men between the end of WWII and the close of the 1950s… an unprecedented, heretofore unthinkable migration of Asian women to US shores and yet an event that has been largely overlooked. Living in mostly isolated communities scattered across the US, the women were left largely to their own devices as they tried to navigate a racially segregated American society. Drawing on personal anecdotes we paint a portrait of their saga that is in equal measure triumph, humor and sadness. We tell their stories both as journalists, and as the mixed-race children who experienced firsthand their dreams, struggles and aspirations.